of the Jesuits; the
world knows that too well already. The details of their proceedings in
Mexico till the time of their expulsion have been too often written by
their enemies. Their great prosperity and their great wealth made them
the envy of the other orders, as corrupt and depraved as themselves,
but not so dangerous, because they had reached that point at which
depravity ceases to contaminate. Dirty, greasy monks could not endure
an order that wore the garb of gentlemen, and were in favor with the
aristocracy, while they themselves were despised.

This envy was all-powerful with them, and led, for a time, to the
laying aside of their own private bickerings, and uniting in the
crusade against the common enemy, the Jesuits, and acting in harmony
with the political power.

NUNNERIES.

The Church has always made much of the nuns. It has ever been the
custom of the priesthood to endeavor to throw a veil of romance over
the very unromantic way of life followed by females who have shut
themselves up for life in a place hardly equal to a second-class
state-prison. Woman has an important place which God has assigned her
in the world; but when she separates herself from the family circle,
and elbows her way to the rostrum, where, with a semi-masculine attire,
and with a voice not intended for oratory, she harangues a tittering
crowd upon the rights of women to perform the duties of men; or goes to
the opposite extreme, and shuts herself up within high stone walls to
avoid the society of the other sex, she equally sins against her own
nature, and not only brings misery upon herself, but inflicts upon
society the evils of a pernicious example, and furnishes a theme for
all kinds of scandal.

Proud families who have portionless daughters; relatives who desire to
get rid of heirs to coveted estates; convents in want of funds and
endowments,[68] or a pretty victim for the public entertainment on
taking the veil; friends who have unmarriageable women on their hands;
and romantic young misses, ambitious of playing the queen for a day at
the cost of being a prisoner for life, have all contributed to populate
the fifteen nunneries of the city of Mexico. In the flourishing times
of the Inquisition, this business of inveigling choice victims into
convents was more profitable, for then murmuring could be crushed into
silence, and parents dreaded to oppose the wretched pimps of
superstition who came to inveigle their daughters int